The Lovey Blog

Jennifer Maher of YourToyPortrait.com makes custom portraits of your child's lovey that are simply incredible, and a beautiful way to keep lovey in your heart and on your walls forever. She can work from a picture or from real life (if your child is willing to give up lovey for a short while!)

Shown here are Maxie and DrumDrum, who belong to 4-year-old Jackson. Check out her incredible art at http://www.yourtoyportrait.com.

While planning a family vacation to Las Vegas recently, I was pleased to discover Trekaroo, a terrific website for researching travel destinations that are family friendly. It features reviews from real parents who have been to the places you are considering, so you know for sure if the hotel is really appropriate for your 4-year-old, or merely a hangout for legions of college-age girls in skimpy bikinis.

You can look up any U.S. destination and find hotels, vacation rentals, fun kid activities, museums and more to keep the family busy and happy during your trip. Each activity or destination has photos, reviews and ratings to help you decide if that activity is right for you. Ratings are provided by families who have visited those locations and are willing to share their experiences. Many activities even feature ratings from locals, who are well-qualified to share the ups and downs of particular venues, since they visit more frequently.

There are tons of great tips on traveling with kids, from how to keep your toddler busy on the airplane, a baby packing checklist, and how to survive Disney without pulling your hair out.

The site features kid-friendly travel gear reviews too, and we are thrilled that our LostMyLovey ID tag was included in this section!

And as if that weren’t enough, you can book hotels and vacation rentals directly on the site, as well as purchase travel gear to keep kids happy while traveling. A discussion forum gives parents the opportunity to ask additional questions and get feedback from readers.

The site helped a great deal in my vacation planning, so I give it a huge thumbs-up! Check out Trekaroo here: www.trekaroo.com

I was checking out some great articles on eHow.com and came across these informative articles on keeping your child's stuffed animals clean. Of course, your child loves the softness and smell of that dirty old lovey, don't they? But at some point you just HAVE to wash it.

Most of these articles say basically the same thing:

1) Shake your stuffed animals inside a pillowcase with some baking soda to remove oils and odors

2) Put your stuffed animals inside a pillowcase to wash them

3) Give them two or three days to air dry (this only works if it isn't THE important lovey)

4) Try to leave your stuffed animals at home when running errands or shopping (this is a good idea so you don't lose your lovey! But if your child has to take it with him, be sure to attach a LostMyLovey ID Tag!)

5) Keep the pets out of your child's bed to avoid allergens and fur gathering on the toys (tell that to my dog!)


http://www.ehow.com/how_2063193_keep-stuffed-animals-clean.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4526899_clean-stuffed-animals-soft-toys.html

http://www.ehow.com/way_5272684_way-clean-stuffed-animals.html
This one encourages you to actually remove the stuffing before washing, then replace after the casing is dry and sew it back up. This is for experienced sewers only with a really dirty lovey!!

http://www.ehow.com/how_5318695_clean-freeze-stuffed-animals.html
If you have a problem with allergens or mites in your home, the mites could be inside your child's stuffed animals. Here's how to clean and kill the mites by putting the stuffed animals in the freezer.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5062852_clean-antique-stuffed-animals.html
Cleaning Antique stuffed animals

How do you ease the transition if your child loses a favorite toy or blankie? One mom got creative and convinced her child that the dryer had magically turned his old tattered blankie into a fresh new one! Check out the article on iParenting here.

Here's a great story about why children get attached to their loveys. According to this researcher, children truly believe their toys possess an inherent life force, and can immediately tell which is their lovey from an identical copy.

No surprise to us parents. Or even to me; as a child I remember dropping my toys on the floor and truly feeling sorry for them that they had gotten hurt.

I wanted to reprint this article here, but the Guardian UK wanted about $200 for permission (um... thanks anyway), so I will just give you a link here. Read the article. Enjoy!

After reading this article about 7-year-old Elodie Springer and her lost toy Babybear, we felt so bad for her. If you haven't read the story, check it out.

Elodie and her family are from the Netherlands and were vacationing in Chicago when they discovered that Babybear was missing. Babybear was Elodie's best buddy and constant companion, and is basically a member of the family. Elodie is of course devastated without her!

They think Babybear may have been lost on the plane from Calgary to Chicago, on United Airlines. If you have seen Babybear or work for United Airlines and have any help to offer this family, please contact them right away.

Babybear is listed on our website here, and you can contact the family by clicking the "Contact Owner" button under their listing.

We are wishing the Muuser family all the best of luck in finding Babybear!

I'm happy to announce that LostMyLovey.com is finally live and ready to go! I hope LostMyLovey will become a resource for helping other moms retrieve their children's lost toys (or maybe never lose them in the first place).

I know first hand the cold panic I felt every time I was digging through the stroller and couldn't find "the bunny", who unbeknownst to me, was lying on the floor of Einstein's Bagels. I walked every aisle of the grocery store next door, getting more and more worried all the time, and finally went to the customer service desk and drew a picture of it for them to hang in the office. It never occurred to me it was in the bagel shop. I got the kids all packed in the car, tears streaming (mine too), and it hit me to go back in there and ask. So I unpacked everyone, went back in, and this nice guy behind the counter held up the bunny - "is this yours!?" I have never been so happy in my life.

Events like this kept happening over and over. Then, and years later, I kept thinking, I know other moms are going through this. Kids drop stuff all the time. I am always hearing stories from moms whose children have a special thing they can't part with, and then tragically lose it somewhere.

Then about a year ago, I was flying home from a trip and my kids had their special loveys with them in their backpacks. While we were in the airport, they kept wanting to take them out and hug them and I was like, "no! no!" because I could just envision us leaving it on the seat in the effort to line up for the plane. This was after about 5 years of repeatedly losing these toys in every restaurant, Starbucks, grocery store, park, and everywhere else you could imagine. And we had gotten this far, I was not about to lose these toys now.

Then the idea for LostMyLovey just hit me, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Since I'm a website designer anyway, I was able to think through the site structure and how it could work, and it just started rolling. And here we are!

I know that every mom I have talked to about the site has told me a similar story about their child's lovey, and how they wished this site and the ID tags had been around to help them. I was just talking to another mom about it a few weeks ago, and she told me that her child's lovey had been swept up in the bedsheets by the maid at a hotel, and they were never able to find it. And a dad said to me that when his son lost his favorite penguin toy, he would have given $1000 to get it back. If he had only had the LostMyLovey ID Tag, he might have gotten it back for a lot less!

I think there is a need for this service, and I hope it will help other moms avoid some of the pain and upset that I went through. I have to make sure I am keeping track of the kids, and my purse, and the car keys, and everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to have one less thing to worry about? I hope you enjoy this site, and that it is helpful to you. I look forward to hearing your feedback, comments, concerns and questions about the site, or the tags, or anything else.

I wish all of you the best of luck in keeping your precious loveys safe.